Hip in the Heartland

Life-sized wall painting in the German Village neighborhood of ColumbusDeborah Fallows

This week Claire Cain Miller of the NY Timesreported on an interesting migration trend. The young, college-educated, professional-and-entrepreneurial class we expect to see concentrating in Brooklyn, the SF Bay Area, DC, Seattle, and three or four other usual-suspect big cities is also now showing up in medium-sized and small places. The story was based on a new study, "Young and Restless," from City Observatory.

This is exactly in parallel with what we've been seeing and reporting on, in locales as non-usual-suspect as Sioux Falls, South Dakota, or Greenville, South Carolina, or Holland, Michigan, or Redlands, California. Now Deb Fallows has a report on this same phenomenon in the capital city of her home state: Columbus, Ohio.

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Among the many things I hadn't known about Columbus before we went there is that it's considered the #3 city in the U.S. fashion-design universe. We've got New York, LA, and then — Columbus, home of influential retailers including The Limited, Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie and Fitch, and others, plus CCAD, the influential Columbus College of Art and Design.

Deb describes some of the "creative class" people who are moving to Columbus, or moving back to Columbus after growing up there and living elsewhere, to be part of the fashion movement. She also describes the touching fate of the state's symbolic Buckeye tree, planted on an official Tree Walk on the grounds of what had been the Ohio Institution for the Deaf and Dumb. I will leave the rest of the story to her and hope you find it as interesting to read as we did to learn about.

The author resting after her reporting, at a gastropub built on the site of a former tombstone factory and operated by an entrepreneur who came to Ohio from Albania

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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.